Guest Blog: Adrian Berry Talks Jacksons Lane's Postcards Festival

Postcards Festival started at Jacksons Lane in 2010 and has now become a much-anticipated annual festival of circus, cabaret and extraordinary performance in North London.

It's 15 nights of thrilling work which constantly confounds expectations and offers so much choice - whether you love anarchic clowning, faux-gospel gigs or logic-defying magic, you'll literally find something for all tastes here. Some of it is subversive and naughty, some family-friendly and charming. But it's all totally original.

Last year we decided to make the festival as affordable and accessible to Londoners (and beyond) as possible and launched it as a Pay What You Decide festival. You still have to book a ticket, but you don't pay when you book. After your totally amazing experience at Jacksons Lane, you can then pay by cash or card, as little or as much as you wish. If you can only afford 50p, cool, so be it. If you can afford £50 - even better!

It's a real smorgasbord of live performance and cabaret - from the tongue-in-cheek sacrilege of Oh My God It's The Church! to the queer black female-led Cocoa Butter Club cabaret, and international ensemble circus from as far afield as Denmark and Ethiopia.

It's probably my favourite time of the year at Jacksons Lane, and I see absolutely everything. The venue looks amazing too: we've subverted the idea of a big top by recreating one in our café bar, plus gorgeous, colourful images of all the artists around the building.

What I love about Postcards is the huge and diverse amount of artists hanging out and working in our building over the week: it's infectious and really brings our building to life, and as a team we can catch snippets of rehearsals and new ideas as the work grows and develops.

Some of it is established work that's been seen around the world, but much of it is super-new, created specifically for Jacksons Lane and - more excitingly - adapted especially for our building. So the experience starts the second you walk into the venue - you might even get dragged backstage for a private peep show, or get a personal one-on-one circus show. Anything could happen.

The Pay What You Decide element is so important to us at Jacksons Lane - there's a lot of inequality and lack of opportunity in our capital, and we are constantly bombarded with countless shows, experiences and performances that many people simply cannot afford. Postcards allows the chance to take a risk, attend multiple shows, bring your friends and family - it's truly democratic and diverse.

At Jacksons Lane we constantly experiment and find new ways of curating circus, performance and cabaret. This year we feel we've finally cracked it and genuinely think Postcards is a unique festival for London. Cabaret and circus have entered the mainstream, which is really great, but through Postcards we are finding alternative ways to present and reinvent the genres. It's a pretty exciting time to be an audience member at Jacksons Lane.

Excuse the cliché but - expect the unexpected! And expect to join in!

Find full event details here

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